grouping in maya vs shocwave
If anybody rembers awhile ago, I had mentioned that I am building a racing game which will be played on the shockwave3D engine. My problem that I now know why I sometimes have problems exporting to shockwave, is because Maya does not collapse the groups as one grouped object, meaning in Director all of the objects that are in the group can still be accessed in Director which is not a true group. A true group in Director means that you can only access the grouped object and the objects are not manipulatable. This is very important for shockwave when you need your objects as groups rather than parented because in shocwave, animations and using the Havok physics engine both like to have their objects grouped together rather than parented. For example, lets say you built a car where the doors are seperate from the chassis. Now in order for the Havok physics engine to move both the doors and the chassis together, these two seperate objects must be grouped as one object. In addition, people have found out that the Havok physics engine can crash if the objects are parented rather than grouped. So I wanted to know if anyone was ever successful in collapsing groups so that they are counted as one whole object, and if so, how did you get this to work?